Let’s Leave JD Sleeping…

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John Ramsey Miller

This week I was reading about a famous photographer with serious financial problems and I was thinking about how her dilemma is really nobody’s business but hers and the people she owes the money to. She collateralized a loan with the copyrights of every photograph she’s ever taken or will take. Other than the fact that it’s a cautionary tale of reversal, it’s just another story about someone who got in over their head. Why do we thrive on other people’s problems and especially their failures? There’s a German word for it that I can never remember how to spell and have to look up. It’s Schadenfreude. I don’t know why we don’t have a word in English for it. We watch fascinated like we’re getting paid for every Icarus that flies too close the media’s headlights. This incident with the photographer got me thinking about copyrights. It’s something authors should think about, become familiar with. I checked on the Net.

How long does a copyright last?
The term of copyright for a particular work depends on several factors, including whether it has been published, and, if so, the date of first publication. As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors. Of course it’s complicated, and I don’t really know much about it. I guess we might all do to know where we stand legally speaking.

How familiar are we with the laws that protect us. And do you understand the Google Settlement? How pissed are we to get if our copyright is violated?

I started a new work this week and I’m excited about it because I’ve been doing a mental dance with the protagonist for a couple of months getting to know him, his cadence, his backstory. It’s not a thriller, it’s a story and I want to tell a story that isn’t a chase against the ticking clock. I don’t want my characters wearing their shoes out twice from the front cover to the back. I just want to once be able to peel an onion layer by layer and build suspense differently. I wonder how I would feel if somebody took this character after I am dead or have wandered off into the woods or am living with my chickens and dogs and put him in a book they wrote. I think I’d be weirded out.

A question comes to mind from a recent lawsuit. If I want to write a book that includes characters from Salinger’s book, CATCHER IN THE RYE, can I do it? Say you want to write a book that takes Holden Caufield thirty or forty years beyond where Salinger left him, can you do it? Why pick up something Salinger dropped? Can you do it if you get Salinger’s permission? Why would anybody write a book, spending a couple of years laboring at it using someone else’s character or characters?

We Have To Remember

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By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

I know that people read blogs for entertainment, and that as a writer, it’s my professional obligation to put fans’ needs ahead of my own. This week, though, I beg your forgiveness, because that’s not going to happen. This blog entry comes from a dark, dark place.

Eight years ago today, 2,980 people were murdered on a beautiful morning. According to WikiAnswers.com, 247 passengers were killed on hijacked airplanes, 2,595 workers were killed in the World Trade Centers, and 125 civilians and military personnel were murdered in the Pentagon. Officials estimate that 1,609 people lost their spouse or partner, and over 3,000 children lost parents. Nearly 6,000 mothers and fathers lost sons and daughters.

Ever stop to think about how horrible it must have been for the victims who’d been sentenced to death that day? Well, here’s a peek (be warned that it’s tough to listen to): http://tinyurl.com/yqdmjw

Does the video make you as angry as it makes me? Good God, those bastards bitch-slapped the most powerful nation on the planet. We should be acrimonious–shouldn’t we?

Well, apparently not. It seems that anger’s no longer cool. I recently heard a late night talk show host use 9/11 as a punch line in his monologue. Not this week, of course, because this is too near the anniversary, and that would be in bad taste. He didn’t mean to make light of the murders, I’m sure, but merely to score a cheap laugh by sticking a rhetorical finger in the eye of a politician. Sorry, some things will never be funny.

But humor eases pain, right?

I understand from educators and psychologists that the images of September 11 are too traumatic to be shown on television anymore. It’s not healthy to think about so much suffering, they say. I’ll defer to their expertise, but I don’t understand how we’re supposed to remember the dead if we don’t think about the plot and the people who murdered them.

And if we don’t remember the victims, how can we possibly remain vigilant? It depresses me that today’s seventh-graders likely have no concept of the trauma that the world endured on September 11, and it angers me that the world seems comfortable with that. Our children are not taught in school that bad people continue to lurk in terrorist cells planning their deaths, and yours, and mine. We teach them to fear garden-variety strangers, but not terrorists.

Is it possible that we’re just lazy? Anger is exhausting, after all, and fear is even more exhausting, so maybe it’s just human nature that we move on and try our best to forget; to let time do its thing to heal wounds. We can always remind ourselves of what it feels like if another attack comes, and then we can be angry again. We can even wave a few flags for a while.

You know, until it’s okay again to turn the tragedy into a punch line on late night television.

The Elusive Fifty Percent

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by Michelle Gagnon

There’s an old adage in marketing: fifty percent of your advertising will work. The kicker is that you’ll probably never know which fifty percent.
Large companies spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out which of their campaigns succeeded through surveys. But the little people (myself included) don’t have access to that option.

Which leads me to this week’s conundrum: trying to figure out how to divide my marketing money for The Gatekeeper. I would hate to eliminate an effort that made a difference last time- the trouble is, I have no idea which aspect of my marketing campaign impacted sales.

In an effort to narrow it down, I asked for help from the MIRA marketing team. Was there anywhere in particular where Boneyard posted more sales? In the Northeast, perhaps, or even in specific stores and chains?

Nope, they said. At least, not as far as they could determine- the best information they had to go on (which, as we’ve discussed in earlier posts, is limited at best) came from Bookscan, and the numbers appeared to be divided equally nationwide.

For other products, there are more options. You could try online ads one month, then print ads the next: if your sales showed more of a bump in the first month, the next time around you could focus more energy online.

Unfortunately, authors don’t have that luxury. Our books have a very limited shelf life. At least with my publisher, the first six weeks count most. Just one month after The Gatekeeper’s release date, many of the copies will already have been taken off the shelves. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks hang in there a bit longer, but for all of us, the next wave of releases knock us off the front racks and back to the stacks (or, worse yet, to the remaindering pile).

Which means that all of my marketing efforts are focused on that six week window. Which results in a madcap book tour, and thousands of dollars scattered in a dozen different directions. Let’s call it the “buckshot” approach to book marketing – throw out everything you can afford in every direction imaginable, and keep your fingers crossed.

I know what didn’t work with my first book. A mass mailing to over a hundred bookstores, which cost a third of my budget and hours of time, most likely ended up in the trash/recycling bin at most of them. Elaine Petrocelli of Book Passage illustrated this at a conference by holding up an enormous trash can filled to the brim with promotional materials from authors and publishers. All collected in ONE WEEK.
Obviously, the next time around I skipped that option.
Even ARCs end up in stacks in the booksellers’ backrooms, most never touched by a single staff member.

Advertising online has some advantages. On sites like Facebook, you pay per click – but whether or not those clicks actually turn into sales remains a big question mark. Some people even run strange programs to make fake clicks for these, meaning that it’s super important to invest in something like click guardian to keep your finances sound. It’s a bit of a minefield otherwise, and without the backing of a big agency individual authors can really risk a sizable amount of revenue just on making sure no one abuses those adverts on the platform. This is why some people choose to use some other method to utilize this system, with places like KlientBoost and other pay per click advertising agencies that could assist your business with pay per click marketing services.

The blog tour I did last time around had an added advantage in that it cost nothing but time- a lot of it, however. By the end of the thirty stop tour, I’d written more than 33,000 words, a full third of a book. And did that help sales? Impossible to know.

I doubt I’m alone in wondering if there might not be a better way. Now that the full burden of marketing has fallen on most authors’ shoulders, couldn’t publishers help by providing more feedback on where they see sales happening? Wouldn’t it behoove them to come up with a more accurate measure than Bookscan? If I knew, for example, that a significant chink of my sales were happening in Kroger’s stores in Arkansas, I’d make a personal effort to connect with those retailers.

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day. I’ve decided to create bookmarks, chapbooks, and magnets per usual- they don’t cost much, and are easy to pass out. I’ll probably do a more limited book tour this time around, and will focus my actual tour on visiting some stores I was forced to skip last year. Aside from that, I’m still at a loss, staring at my Boneyard marketing spreadsheet, wondering what else to include and what to cut. Any and all suggestions are welcome- what’s worked for you in the past? Has anything in particular compelled you to buy a book you might not have known about otherwise?

Forensic Files

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I’m proud to welcome my friend and fellow ITW thriller author Lisa Black to TKZ today. Lisa claims to have spent the happiest five years of her life in a morgue. Strange, perhaps, but true. In her job as a forensic scientist she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she works as a latent print examiner and crime scene analyst for a police department in Florida. EVIDENCE OF MURDER is her fourth published thriller.

evidence-murder I do not make a habit of taking my plots from real-live cases—it always sounded like a good way to get sued to me—but the germ of an idea for Evidence of Murder did come from a case I worked with the coroner’s office in Cleveland, Ohio. A woman who worked as an escort—quite legitimately, through an agency that could be looked up in the phone book—disappeared from the face of the earth after one final date.  She had a steady live-in boyfriend and an eight year old daughter. The story stuck in my mind for two reasons.

black-lisa

One, escorting (if that’s what it’s called) seemed like an odd way to make a living—at least to me, having been married long enough that spending every night with a different man sounds like an agonizing amount of work. Certain readers may be disappointed, but very little of the book refers to the victim’s job. For the most part it is mentioned only to point out that every person she encountered wrote her off as a brainless bimbo, including—at first—my main character, Theresa MacLean.

Two, it was one of those cases where the cops were positive they knew whodunit, but could not prove it. One huge disservice that the television shows do to the field of forensics is to insist that you can always find more evidence if you just look harder. Yeah, right. That’s like saying doctors could cure cancer if they really tried and obese people would be thin if they’d only eat less. Sometimes a clue (or a cure, or a solution) simply isn’t there. Sometimes cool things are there but may not be clues. I have a mental list of my real-life cool clues that never went anywhere. In one high-profile case where a mother of three was abducted from the parking lot of the local mall and later found assaulted and shot to death in her own van, I kept finding rabbit hairs dyed a brilliant cherry red. The family had only just bought the van and gave me every set of hairs, every coat, every piece of clothing they thought might have been in it. I asked the detectives to keep an eye out for some fun fur trim or a lucky rabbit’s foot (though those had fallen out of style by 1996). It never turned up. By the time we caught the killers, a year had passed. No red rabbit fur. Another time I was examining the raincoat of a murdered prostitute under ultraviolet light, looking for semen or fluorescing fibers. At one spot on this plastic raincoat a pattern leapt up—a crystal-clear design of stylized daisies, something that would have been popular during my childhood in the late 60’s or early 70’s. Obviously the raincoat had been up against something with fluorescent properties and, for some obscure chemical reasons I couldn’t begin to guess, transferred to the vinyl. In regular light, the pattern became invisible. I described it to the detectives but again, no bells rung. In forensics, contrary to what you see on TV, you have to make your peace with not knowing everything.

Sometimes clues are there but can’t tell you enough. Finding the hair of the victim in, say, the trunk of the suspect’s car might be very incriminating—if he says he never met the woman, it might be enough to convict him. If he happens to live with the woman, it means exactly nothing, since her hair is likely to be all over the apartment and easily transferred to items he might put in the trunk. Or she might have dropped it there while leaning over to take out the groceries. Or it might have fallen out when he transported her body to the dump site. There’s no way to tell. So I wanted to explore what happens when every physical clue Theresa finds simply leads her to a brick wall instead of some helpful revelation.

Do you use problems in your character’s workplace to further the plot, and how? After all, when your character’s profession relates to their process of detection, it’s more interesting when the day job doesn’t go as planned.

Visit Lisa Black on the web at http://www.lisa-black.com/

My summer vacation: Dodging bullets in Chicago

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Okay, I didn’t literally dodge any bullets. But it felt like that last week when I was in Chicago, getting my daughter settled into art school.

It was my first-ever visit to the City of Big Shoulders, about which Saul Bellow famously said, “No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.”

Day One: My husband and I are eating in our hotel’s cafe when we hear a symphony of sirens filling the air. Outside the window, police cars are jamming into the street. We quickly discover that an aggressive panhandlers has gone ballistic; when the police try to pepper-spray him, he grabs an elderly man and holds a knife to his throat. The police surround him and shoot him at point-blank range. The panhandler is dead, the elderly man is okay; a police officer is also hit, but saved by his bullet-proof vest.

Day Two: Sometime during the move-in of my daughter into her new dorm, my wallet gets lifted by a pickpocket. Within two hours of the time I lost my wallet, the pickpocket buys a bunch of stuff at Bed, Bath and Beyond and launches a shopping blitzkrieg into Best Buy.

Day Three: During the parent orientation at my daughter’s new school, an administrator tries to reassure us about safety. They say that the kids can be escorted from building to building. Somehow I am not comforted by this announcement.


Day Four: I try to cash a check at our Marriott hotel (where we’re staying), and am told that I need my license to do that. I spend copious amounts of time discussing with a stone-faced clerk the reasons why this isn’t possible, since my wallet has been stolen. I even produce a copy of the police report. Stone Face is not impressed.

Day Five: I discover that it’s easier to get on an airplane without ID than it is to cash a check at the Marriott. Overall, boarding a plane sans license is a very instructive experience. The TSA grills me about the streets outside my home, where I was born, what states I’ve lived in, specific addresses where I’ve lived, the names of current and former employers, where I went to school, etc. I find it a bit alarming that the government has so much personal information in a file that they can access instantly. Then I start to worry that I’m flunking the test, because the TSA and I disagree about which states I’ve lived in. However, they let me board the plane.

Day Six through Now: In addition to suffering from empty-nest syndrome, I worry that I’ve released my chick into a flock of knife-wielding, pickpocket seagulls.

Of course, it’s all great material for a writer. But I seriously would have preferred to come up with a pickpocket story without the “research.”

How about you? Have you had any summer adventures you can share?

Justice

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne
http://www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com/

One of the reasons many of us enjoy crime fiction is the satisfaction of seeing something so rarely provided us in our real lives – justice. As a crime writer I feel it is my duty to play fair with the reader but that doesn’t always mean that at the end of my books the perpetrators get their ‘comeuppance’.


At the end of The Serpent and The Scorpion for instance (and I’ll try to avoid spoilers here) I felt that if I was to remain true to the politics of the time I could have no other ending but, nevertheless, the injustice of the slippery Machiavellian world of the British Empire galled me.

As a reader I have no problem with these sort of endings – where justice is impossible in the circumstances – it may be frustrating but I’m okay with it so longs as it rings true. What ruins a good crime novel for me, however, is the feeling of being cheated at the end – that the writer has not played fair and that the resolution provided is a let down. On TKZ we blog a lot about the craft of writing a mystery and I think as a writer in this genre I owe it to my readers to grapple with the concept of justice in each of my books – be it in terms of retribution, punishment or some other form of satisfaction. Although we want the perpetrator to get what he or she deserve I think there’s more to it that that – I think many of want to feel as though ‘right’ has been done.

So what are the parameters for ‘justice’ that I use to help guide me when I am crafting my novels?

  • I like to consider that the effort taken in solving the mystery is commensurate with the resolution (no sudden appearances at the end of a vital clue that negates all the protagonist has done).
  • I want the final conflict to have emotional resonance (no lightning bolt hitting Doctor Evil by mere chance) so the reader feels satisfied.
  • I like to place the mystery in an overall societal context so the reader gets to understand just how the system works (or doesn’t work) and what social, political or economic conditions dictate how the perpetrator will be punished (or not) or conversely how the victim is treated. [Okay, okay, so this is just the history nerd in me…]
  • I also want to consider what kind of ending makes the most sense and feels the most satisfying to me, both as a reader and a writer. I don’t like endings that feel rushed or abbreviated – or ones that leave too many threads hanging to be satisfying.
  • And finally – at the end if justice cannot be done then as a writer/reader I better damn well know why…

So what makes an ending satisfying to you? Do you agree that most fans of crime novels like to see some kind of ‘justice’ done at the end of a book? What kind of endings fail to live up to your expectations?

Like, Ya Know?

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by James Scott Bell


Words matter.

I am not a grammar snob or the vocabulary sheriff, but I do care about language because that’s what I use to tell a story or make a point. A culture needs both compelling tales and right reason. That’s why It’s important to educate the young about words lest the whole edifice of our human interactivity rot from the bottom up.

When a society’s stratum of inarticulate goofs expands, the ability to cohere as a people necessarily contracts. Eventually you’ll end up with competing tribes who only understand their own particular mode of grunting.

Our current trend line is not a happy one. High school dropouts of the 1950’s were better able to communicate than most college grads today. In fact, read the Civil War letters of soldiers. Written by farm boys in their teens and twenties, they are positively Shakespearean compared to today’s glut of emails and tweets. Don’t u agree?

Soggy language begets soggy thought. When that happens, emotion replaces reason as the sinew of communication (just watch the screaming-head opinion smack downs on TV, or any randomly selected brain softener tagged, euphemistically, a “reality show.”)

Words matter.

Disinterested does not mean uninterested.

“Begs the question” does not mean “Invites the question.”

And “ya know” does not add a convincing note to what you’re trying to say.

I invite you to listen to slam poet Taylor Mali on this topic. Then talk amongst yourselves: Do words still matter? Can language be saved?

Vampires, White Whales And Spiderwebbing

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John Ramsey Miller

I got this e-mail the other day from a college student:
“I love your writing. Since I was little I hated reading books. I absolutely hated it. But the first time I read one of your books, I was hooked. So far I have made it through Inside out, Upside down, and Side by side. Not once have you disappointed me. Usually when I read your books, I have some sort of background music playing which really adds to the intensity, just like in a movie. Usually I just play the song “Anxiety” by the Black eyed peas and it’s so far worked pretty well. My goal is to try and hopefully read all of your books by the time I’m done with college. Thank you so much for your writings.”

Naturally I’m flattered, but ultimately I wonder why has he hated reading since he was little? Leaves me thinking if maybe it’s the music he’s really enjoying.

Some few do manage to live forever through their work, although I doubt they are aware of it. We can’t physically live forever, but a person’s work can live on after them, and that may be one of the reasons we write, or design buildings, or paint, or quilt, or run for political office. Last week, with the death of Edward Kennedy, I was thinking about politics, and how the four presidents whose faces are carved into Mt. Rushmore will certainly be there staring out at the landscape long after people forget who they were, and possibly even after there are no people left to puzzle it out. I was considering the great statesmen and orators I’ve seen in my lifetime, and the sorry crop of legislators I see in office now. Perhaps it has always been the case that there are a few shining examples of solid thinkers and unselfish statesmen, men and women of conscience and always doing what’s best for the country, and the rest have always been minor players (if not intellectually or morally subpar to the standouts of history). Conservatives and liberals may argue to the last man standing over which of their own were the greatest hits in legislative history.

In talking to students recently I got the impression that a lot of them think books are taught in classrooms based solely on the importance of the author’s work to dusty academics, and not how relevant their work remains, and certainly not based on what benefit students get from reading them. Let me say here that I think literary history is every bit as important as the U.S. history or art, politics or of music. I think every student ought to understand how important the first amendment to the Constitution is, and how censorship by one group has threatened the free exchange of ideas for all people.

Might it be better if literary history was taught the way art history is taught where students learn a little about a lot of artists and why their work was relevant to their period as well as ours. Do students need to read Beowulf, or won’t Cliff Notes Lite do for most of the classics. You don’t get two artists like Degas and Picasso in a semester’s worth of art history classes. In my mind, Melville, Poe, I get a picture of a bunch of now-dead authors on a carousel that has been turning faster and faster for centuries and decades until they are hanging on by their fingernails.

In high school I read Hawthorne and Melville, but what average high school student would read MOBY DICK were it not out of academic necessity. For me, reading the classics––especially CATERBURY TALES and any Shakespeare play was like taking Cod Liver Oil. If the idea is to instill an enjoyment in reading, toss them CARRIE, INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS, BELOVED, SOPHIE’S CHOICE, BULLET PARK, IN COLD BLOOD… make your own list. Save the true Classics for lit history and college courses. I think the idea is to get young people reading more than spending their free time glued to TV or computer screens where their minds aren’t making pictures to accompany the words.

I guess when reading is homework and the books more or less inaccessible and seemingly irrelevant to someone’s life, you are making pages filled with words an enemy. You say Beowulf and kids see spider webs. Some old peg-legged guy (an obsessive, self-destructive, revenge-seeking whale hunter) chasing the object of his rage across the oceans means less to most kids today than it did our grandfathers. We all have white whales that we are chasing, or running from.

As writers we understand the importance of celebrating great writing, and great ideas, and want to know how literature affected or reflected the time. So, do you believe educators should keep pushing the classics, or put more emphasis on works more relevant to the lives and interests of our young?

You Can’t Stand on a Broken Leg

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By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

No movie and few books have ever gotten a structure fire right. The movie Ladder 49 was on television the other day, and like all similar movies before it—from Backdraft to Firehouse Dog—the producers created a smokeless, heatless fire that defies the laws of physics and chemistry. You can’t stand in a real structure fire. That “heat always rises” lesson you learned in high school makes standing very uncomfortable. It’s a good way to singe your ears. Visibility is zero. Truthfully, a real structure fire is not at all photogenic, which is why, of course, they film them the way they do.

But authors should know better. We don’t have to worry about lighting and lenses; we get to portray all the senses. We really have no excuse for getting it wrong.

Most movies don’t get bullet wounds right, either. In movies, they make holes that are way too big and they do far too little damage. Based on my fifteen years of fire and rescue service experience, the best movie bullet wounds—hands down—are in Saving Private Ryan. That scene where they’re treating the medic is spot-on perfect. By the way, that clichéd notion of the good guy getting shot in the shoulder and walking away is complete hooey. Take a look at the anatomy of the shoulder joint and point to me the possible path for a bullet that would not be devastating.

I read a book fairly recently where our hero broke his leg in a fall and continued to fight. (“It’s only broken,” he said.) Uh-huh. How did the author think for a moment that a person can stand on a broken leg? The point, I think, was that the character could suck up the pain. Okay, that’s fine. But if you break the bone that is part of the scaffold that keeps you standing, how the hell are you supposed to walk away and fight some more?

These are the kinds of esoteric details that make me crazy—stuff that is so easily researched, but for which some authors don’t take the time. These are the kinds of technical mistakes that eject me right out of a book.

And at this point in my diatribe, I must confess that I am a practitioner—not of laziness, but of inaccuracy. In this case, intentional inaccuracy. In the opening scene of No Mercy, Jonathan Grave crashes into a house to rescue a good guy from the clutches on two bad guys. He orders them to freeze, and then he spends a short paragraph negotiating with a bad guy to drop his weapon. I’ve heard from several of my buddies who crash doors for a living that this scene makes them crazy. The rule in the real world of tactical entries is very simple: See guy with gun, kill guy with gun.

But here was my dilemma as I wrote the scene: Since this is literally the first chapter of the first book in a series that stars a character that readers don’t yet know, I thought that the average reader would find the real-life approach to be off-putting. More like an assassination than a rescue. So I made a conscious decision to sacrifice reality for character development. I still think it was the right decision, even if it did bother a few experts.

How about you folks? Have you writers intentionally done things the “wrong way” for the sake of a better story? Are you readers forgiving of such things?

Put Away Your Passport

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by Michelle Gagnon

A fellow writer asked during a recent Sisters in Crime meeting if we felt it necessary to visit every location where our books are set. A debate ensued between the people who said it was absolutely critical to see a place in order to convey an accurate sense of it, and those who thought that having to visit a place in order to describe it might end up limiting the scope of your story.

Here’s an anecdote that came to mind: I attended one of Martin Cruz Smith’s readings a few years back. Someone asked how long he’d lived in Russia prior to writing Gorky Park, since he had done such an amazing job of nailing the feel of the place, from the muddied politics to the bathhouses. His response? A week.

How on earth did he manage to develop a sense of the place in a week? The person asked.

Smith shrugged, and said, “Actually, I barely saw anything when I was there. Most of it I just made up.”

That story always stuck with me, since as a writer the travel question is something I constantly grapple with. I would love to spend half the year jetting around to exotic locations (wouldn’t we all?), but pragmatically speaking there’s no way that will ever happen (and frankly, I would prefer to steer clear of some of the places where my books are set. For God’s sake, CRIME happens there).

Of course, I could make my life easier by setting stories in the Bay Area – I can’t explain why I developed such an unfortunate tendency to set my books on the east coast, or pretty much anywhere that I’m not currently living.

THE TUNNELS took place at my alma mater. I would have loved to have made a trip back while I was writing the book, but financially there was just no way (and my reunions always seem to conflict with Bouchercon).

Same with BONEYARD: I spent a summer living in the Berkshires, but that was nearly two decades ago. I still remember what the place felt like, but in terms of landmarks, much has probably changed.

For THE GATEKEEPER, which jumps from location to location across the southwest, this became particularly problematic. I’ve never been to Houston, yet a considerable portion of the book takes place there.

And the book I just started takes place almost entirely in Mexico City. While I’d love to justify a visit south of the border, it probably won’t happen this year.

So how do I handle this? I improvise. I read guidebooks. I spend hours scouting places with Google maps (special thanks to them for their satellite view option- that feature has been life changing for me). Boneyard revolved around a particular section of the Appalachian Trail, and I read online journals and blog posts by people who had hiked that section. With each book I probably end up doing as much location research as investigating how to build a dirty bomb, or neo-paganism, or whatever else gets incorporated into the story.

Of course, there are times when I wish I was Cara Black, able to write off a month-long Parisian vacation by setting my books there. But I believe that your story finds you. I’ve never once sat back and thought, “I’d really like to set the next book in the Berkshires.” Whatever germ of an idea I have, it always seems to be one that could only take place somewhere specific. And that somewhere has yet to be a place that I live (Freud would probably have a field day with that).

So my question is, do you think that passport has to get stamped in the interest of verisimilitude? Or will Google maps suffice?